The present invention relates to systems and methods for simplifying nodes in a network display, and more particularly to systems and methods for simplifying an object model display by automatically arranging or re-arranging objects in the model.
One goal of modeling systems, such as the Unified Modeling Language (UML) and other modeling systems, is to provide a means to specify, construct, document and visualize the artifacts of a distributed system such as a distributed object system in the case of UML. The display rendered in such systems provides the user with a visual feedback that allows the user to simply and easily understand the model paradigm being created or implemented. In the case of UML, or other object modeling systems, object nodes are displayed in a topology along with relationships (e.g., associations) between the various object nodes so as to create an object network topology. Object nodes are typically connected by connector lines which represent various associations between objects nodes. In the case of workflow, for example, the connector lines represent the direction of control flow between objects, and in the case of UML tools, the connector lines represent association or inheritance relationships between the objects.
However, such network topology displays become very confusing for large topologies (e.g., large number of objects and associations): the user is often presented with a complex web of tangled connections. Above a certain level of network complexity, it becomes difficult for the user to make much sense of the display and to determine which nodes are connected. For example, if two object nodes in opposite corners of a displayed diagram are connected by an association, the corresponding connector line may cross the entire diagram and possibly other object nodes. Consequently, it may be very difficult to determine to which object nodes the connector line is associated. Current development tools, such as Rational Rose and Oracle's JDeveloper, only provide limited means for re-organizing object nodes and do not provide a robust automatic solution to such problem.
Accordingly, it is desirable to provide systems and methods for automatically simplifying a network display, and in particular an object node display, to allow a user to easily identify and determine which nodes are connected.